The invention discloses a near-field source positioning method based on 
factor analysis, and aims to solve the problems that a traditional subspace method is complex in calculation, cannot perform real-
time processing and is poor in parameter 
estimation performance under a low 
signal-to-
noise ratio. According to a neural 
network method, upper triangular elements of a 
covariance matrix of trainingsample signals are generally used as features of the signals to perform network training, and in a 
large array with a large number of array elements, the upper triangular elements of the 
covariance matrix of the signals are used as input 
signal features, so that the complexity of a neural network is improved, and the network 
training time is prolonged. Therefore, the invention provides the near-field source 
signal positioning method for dimension reduction by using the 
factor analysis method. According to the method, a few reconstructed feature variables are used for replacing original featurevariables to research and analyze things, so that the 
feature dimension of the network input signals is reduced, the input signal features after dimension reduction are used for training of the neural network, the training speed is increased, the real-time performance of the 
algorithm is high, and the 
engineering application value of the method is enhanced.